Research and Planning

Due to lots of research and planning being put onto my blog during the working process, I have decided to have a final review of it all to tidy it up:

As a group our task was to produce a short News piece for the radio, we had previously used the radio equipment during our preliminary task and so were used to the equipment such as the mike and knew the computer program: Audacity.

For our initial research we listened too and analysed some established radio stations se we could see how they performed. I wanted diversity in the stations I listened too so that I could get ideas from all areas of radio, because of this I looked at two national stations: Heart and BBC Radio 1, and a local station: 96.5 Bolton FM. Another good thing about this was that one was from the opposite end of the UK and I could see if different regions performed differently.

I already have sections on both these stations on my blog, so rather than repeating all that I shall give a quick overview:

Heart is the local station for London but also goes national; this made it very interesting to research. It played popular music and has a memorable jingle ‘This is Heart’ which I recognised even though I hadn’t really tuned in beforehand; this argues that the 2-Step Flow theory is effective as I must have heard it from others and once tuning into Heart, made my own decision. The news segment was sharp and included all the top headlines, but also featured a section of local news to the capital. As a listener I enjoyed Heart and found it easy to listen too although locally I thought it could have been more in-depth.

BBC Radio 1 is a national station and one I had listened too before. They play chart music and have celebrity presenters such as Chris Moyles, Veron Kay and Fearne Cotton. Although many of the presenters on Radio 1 are very good it became apparent that being a television celebrity does not make you a natural at radio, and many would trail off with uninteresting tales of their own lives. The news section covered the main stories but the shows were generally centred on music and light hearted ‘banter’.

96.5 Bolton FM is the local station for Bolton in Lancashire. The initial sound-bite sounded less professional then the previous two shows but understandably they’d have a cheaper recording system. This station was very local and the news consisted of information about the local market and what the people of Bolton were up too. We needed to learn from this for when we presented our local news section.

For a more in depth look please look at my earlier blog posts.

From this point on me and the group had a brain storm about our radio news segment. We targeted it to be around 4 – 6 minutes long and include both local and nation stories, also including weather and sports, possibly ending with a light hearted story. In our preliminary piece we had branded ourselves as a light hearted team; this was backed up by our name ‘The Coconut Lounge’, and through our presenting we joked around and gave each other silly nicknames. All though there was nothing wrong with this in the right context, we felt as news presenters our final piece needed to be more serious and constructive to meet the mise en scene of the news. We ditched the nicknames and decided upon our first basic timeline which was as followed:



Jingle -30 seconds

Headlines – 1 minute

Main Story – 2 minutes

Vox-Pop (weather) – 30 seconds

Sports – 1 minute

Light Story to end on (interview) – 1 minute


This basic plan gave us bones to work on so that we could build our piece. The idea behind this was that we wanted to include as much as possible such as vox-pops and a jingle without overdoing it and rushing the reports. We were definitely in the planning stage of our final piece.

We began to choose the news stories we wished to present, we chose the stories to represent our mise en scene of a serious news show but with the light-hearted stories common to national news shows such as 'The News at Ten'. I have an earlier more in depth section about this already on my blog, so again a quick over view:

Headlines were to be up to date and researched on the day as we didn’t need to practise talking about them, this was also to be true of weather, we would report on how it was at the time of recording to keep our show relevant and interesting.

Our Main Story was to be the earthquake in Haiti and the aftermath of that.

Sports would include the John Terry affair and up to date football scores.

The light hearted story would be a man with a large crocodile collection in the local area.

We chose real life stories because we wanted to relate to our audience and allow them to feel emotion for the news. We also chose the stories we did because they interested us and so any excitement or sorrow in our voices would be real and therefore a better performance. We began to script sections:

Alex: A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti.
The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died.
Haiti's worst quake in two centuries hit south of the capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, wrecking the presidential palace, UN HQ and other buildings.

Liam: A "large number" of UN personnel were reported missing by the organisation. Many people have spent the night outside amid fears of more aftershocks

Please see an earlier post for full script.

Once we had planned and scripted it all our Time Line changed and looked more like this:

Jingle 20-30 seconds
News headlines 20-30 seconds
Main story in depth 1 minute
Vox pop 30 seconds to be carried out on location
Funny news stories 20-30 seconds
Football news 20-30 seconds
Weather 20-30 seconds
Local weather
Vox pop 30 seconds on location
Jingle 20-30 seconds

This change showed our piece was progressing all the time and we knew we were moving forwards.

To improve this script-work we used brain-storms to decide exactly what we wanted to present and how. Using the influence we had gained from our researched radio stations we decided to present a vast mix of both light-hearted and serious news stories that can juxtapose and give something to everyone, improving our fan-base.

From here we began recording...